Cloister (Cathedral of Trier)

Any comments or suggestions are highly welcome. How would you process

this image?

Beautiful shot, wonderful composition and light.

I totally agree with Jerry, awesome!

... if you really wanted it to pop, you'd work on the overexposed exterior of the cloister. This is a familiar problem for those who shoot these beautiful walkways. The best ways to do this, of course, are either judicious use of HDR or (my preference), layer masking of a shorter exposure of the same shot (of course, with either, you need a tripod). BTW, your extreme low angle here is interesting (as is your choice of folder name).

Dear Dennis, thank you very much for your suggestion. My first impulse was that I wanted to get rid of the exterior as I thought it might distract the view from the main subject, the arches of the cloister. But on the other hand, the exterior adds some more information on the building, which is a good argument to include it. I would really like to try the layer masking. But unfortunately, I don't have a second picture from exactly the same position, as I didn't use a tripod. On the other hand, it partly works as well when overlaying the inverted grayscale image.

Regards

 

Marcus

 

PS: The name of the folder is the ancient roman name of the city of Trier

I completely agree with Dennis, thats a common problem with high contrast shots, this is an example and also when shooting indoor cathedrals , good luck and congratulations // Salvador

... knew what it was, thought it very interesting that you used it :) Thanks for the explanation. You can also try another trick, especially if you shoot raw. Create a version with exposure adjusted and use that for a layer mask, or possibly an HDR. It's a trick Rick du Boisson told me about that I have used when stuck.

Dennis, that's a great idea, thank you! I always shoot RAW, but here I totally forgot that this gives me the possibility to play with exposure and hence with mask techniques or HDR. I am absolutely curious to try this and see the result.

I am really happy that I posted this image now because, finally (and thanks to you Dennis, Salvador), I get very good suggestions that help me to learn.

BTW, of course I visited your PN pages and I must say that, thematically as well as aesthetically, your photos are absolutely captivating and a great pleasure to look at. I'll come back soon to see them all and dedicate more time on them.

And thank you very much Jerry and Steffen for your nice comments.

 

Regards

 

Marcus

 

 

Dennis, I just tried several masking and HDR-like techniques. The results were always disappointing (flat, uninteresting, a bit too dark, deprived of some nice details like the end of the corridor etc.) unfortunately. I think the reason is that many of the bright parts of the exterior are burnt out such that even in an EV -6 version no information on these parts could be recovered. So, I think I'll stay with my original version for now.

Thank you very much again for your ideas and suggestions.

 

Regards

 

Marcus